The Fourth Door
by Hel-Lokisdotter
Summary: Days after Jack Mort and the confrontation on the beach, a fever-mad Roland spots the fourth door over the dunes. Brief and fairly abstract, just a little what-if. Crossover. Gen.


Roland's fever was starting to abate, but too slowly. He still raved and twisted in the grip of it, lost in a nightmare the others had no way of understanding. Even so, as Eddie and Susannah struggled together to lift her chair over a particularly treacherous dune, it was Roland's bloodshot eyes that caught sight of the fourth door.

He let out a hoarse, birdlike cry, pointing the stump of his right finger over the dune, and set out at a weak shambling run. "Cuthbert! Bert, you see it! You must see it!" Scrambling up the shifting, slicked sand of the slope, he fell to his knees and went on crawling, apparently blind to his own helplessness. His hat had fallen off, rolling down the unsteady ground to settle in a drift of dust. Exchanging a glance with Susannah, Eddie let go of the chair to pick up the hat.

"Roland... Roland, man, there's nothing there," he started, scrambling tiredly after the gunslinger, the hat in his hand and his forehead drawn into deep valleys of concern. His mouth opened to continue as he bent down to help Roland up, but then he saw the door, too, and his mouth went from just open to positively _gaping_.

Ask Eddie afterwards, or Susannah for that matter, and they would swear blind that the door wasn't there when they crested the dune before that one. But it was there now, and it continued to be there when, exhausted and limping, Eddie all but carried the other two up to it. At that point, the sun was starting to go down, and Susannah and Eddie were starting to cast nervous looks at the shore, where the _did-a-chick, did-a-chum_ of the lobstrosities would soon be starting. But the door was above the high-tide line, and they had their guns. Roland, for his part, didn't seem to notice the darkening sky. His tongue darted out to wet his dry, sandy lips, and his pale blue eyes were feverishly bright. "Do you feel it, Alain?" he whispered, slumping against the back of Susannah's wheelchair and staring up at Eddie. "It's here, it's close..."

"Yeah, buddy. It's close." Eddie sounded distracted, but only because he was. The door was close now, and this close it looked somehow stranger than the others – stranger, because there was nothing so obviously odd about it. It had depth, in the way the others he'd seen hadn't. It was blue, not brown, and there was something oddly familiar about it, as though he'd seen it or something like it in another life. Susannah was frowning at it with the same intensity, even while she supported Roland with one strong, slim hand.

"Not like the others, is it, honeybunch?" she murmured, looking back at Eddie, but he could only shrug. "And someone's been here, look."

He followed her pointing finger with his eyes, and squinting in the dimness of evening, he could just see the light indents of footprints on the sand, trailing away from the door. One set of footsteps, going one way. He felt his mouth go dry, and looking at Susannah, he knew she felt the same way.

"Someone..." he started, in a whisper, and found his voice dropping off into a shallow whisper.

"Someone _left_ here," Susannah finished for him, correcting herself, and swallowed. "I don't like this. We ought to get movin', we can't... hey! Hey, Roland!"

The gunslinger had stumbled away from her, finding a new and surprising burst of strength somewhere in his fever-fed madness, and before Eddie could take more than a couple of steps after him, Roland's denuded right hand was grasping the handle of the door.

He tugged it open, eyes on the Great Letters above the door, and stood there with an audible rasp of breath, staring inside. Light spilled out across the dusk-shadowed beach, and over the beginnings of the lobstrosities' conversation there rose a low, mechanical hum. The fledgling ka-tet were all but frozen, hypnotised by what was beyond the door. No street, no plane, no eyes. Inside, there was only golden light and beams that arched like a cathedral overhead, holding the steadily glowing column at the centre. Nothing else. Only the tower of light, lifted on its plinth, looking impossibly complex and almost alive.

Then Roland collapsed, shoving the door shut as he folded, and the vision was gone. His voice broke, and tears flowed freely down his haggard, flushed cheeks.

"Wrong door," he whispered, and seemed to come back to himself for a moment. His eyes, when they came up to meet Eddie's and Susannah's, were dull with recognition. "Wrong way. Let's go."

"But..."

"In your father's name, Eddie Dean, let's _go_!"

Shocked into action by being recognised for the first time since the confrontation at the third door, Eddie nodded dumbly and went to help Roland up. In the gathering dark, over the nightmarish questions from the scuttling shadows in the tide, they staggered on, limp and exhausted, away from the fourth door, the blue one with nine Great Letters above the door, the door that was not a door, but simply bigger on the inside.


End file.
